One of the greatest difficulties that filmmaker Juan Antonio Bayona faced when filming ‘The Snow Society’ was capturing, as accurately as possible, dangerous situations and extreme conditions that the survivors of the tragedy in the Andes of 1972 faced. This is what the director himself has explained on social networks, where he has shown how some of the most important scenes of the film were recorded, such as the avalanche that hits head-on. to the crew inside the already damaged plane.

“The snow was made of dust. The ‘luggage’ they threw at the actors was made of light rubber. Your safety was always of utmost importance. Also, let’s not forget the work done by the visual effects team that added the additional “avalanche” effects that are seen outside, through the windows,” Bayona detailed along with a video that, as a ‘making of’ of the feature film, shows how the entire team got involved to record this moment.

A scene that, for Netflix, is “both a cinematic marvel and a collection of unforgettably disturbing performances.” The avalanche is not the only element that required maximum effort of the entire staff to perfectly portray the harsh reality that the survivors of Flight 571 of the Uruguayan Air Force were experiencing. The very scenarios in which the protagonists move had to strongly showcase what it was like to deal with one of the most inaccessible and hostile environments on the planet.

A large number of scenes were filmed in Sierra Nevada, in Granada, an ideal space to achieve the objective. “The location where ‘The Snow Society’ takes place fascinates by its beauty and the terror it inspires in the viewer. It is one of the main attractions of the film. Since it is a place where it is impossible to film with a conventional crew, the recreation of the iconic Valley of Tears has been generated with the fundamental support of the visual effects team,” Bayona said.

A team without which “it would have been impossible to achieve the level of authenticity and realism with which the film is planned”, pointed out the director, who moved forward with this project with a key question that was repeated throughout the filming: how can the main characters blend in with the environment, an environment devoid of life? “That was one of the objectives of our director of photography, Pedro Luque,” Bayona detailed.

“The approach was none other than to leave the actors free in that environment that it also freed the cameraallowing him to film anything that could happen spontaneously, at any time,” the director of the renowned film explained, also on social networks, specifying that Luque “described it perfectly when he said that ‘the amalgamation between the cinematographic and the documentary is the key to ‘The Snow Society’, a very fine line between realism and the poetry of cinema.'”